Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of
the Hayden Planetarium, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Dr. Tyson is the first African American to head the Planetarium, or any major
scientific department at the Museum. Neil Tyson grew up in Riverdale and
graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He received his PhD from
Columbia, and did a three year post doc at Princeton where he is still on the
faculty. He is a
teacher in astronomy and astrophysics at Princeton, the author of ten books, and
a frequent guest on late night TV. It was announced on August 5, 2011, that
Tyson will be hosting a new sequel to
Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A
Personal Voyage television series.

Dr. Tyson is also very vocal about science education and the need for
students to seriously consider STEM field professions (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Math) so that America can move into the future prepared for
the challenges and possibilities. In 2001, US President George W. Bush
appointed Tyson to serve on the Commission on the Future of the United
States Aerospace Industry and in 2004 to serve on the President's Commission
on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, the latter
better known as the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" commission. Soon afterward he
was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest
civilian honor bestowed by NASA.

Sandra Kitt: Any thoughts on what you might have become if you hadn’t been so
fascinated with astronomy at nine?

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Just before I said I wanted to be an astronomer I said I wanted to be a
baseball
player. I was quite athletic at the time, probably because I was bigger than
other
kids, and if you’re bigger than other kids and you’re 11 you win everything
(laugh). I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy
words,
their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the
listener.
I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write
[the] perfect
sentence I know it. if I had a second life I’d be a librettist for Broadway
musicals
(laugh).

SK: When did you first begin to realize that you also enjoyed writing?

Dr. Tyson
with author Sandra Kitt

NT: I wrote a column for
Star Date magazine. Which was published out of the
University of Texas. It started out as a newsletter. It was a question and
answer
column for them. This is where I decided, sure, I can answer any question
you
have about the universe, but that’s no fun. I could send you to page 12 of
the
encyclopedia. Today I’d just send you to Wikipedia if it’s just an answer.
So, I just
wanted to have more fun with it. So someone might ask, how hot is the sun?
Rather than just give a temperature I might say something like, well if you
visited
the sun in flameproof underwear (laughing) and pulled out your thermometer,
you’d get this reading. In a book or an essay that I might write for a
magazine if
you lose someone along the way they put it down. And you don’t know if
they’ll
ever pick it up again. So I try to write in a way where you care deeply what
the
next paragraph will be. I hear the rhythm of prose and that, to me,
distinguishes
great writing from ordinary writing. By the way, I don’t even claim that I’m
good.
I claim that I value it. So I’m not writing for myself. I’m writing as an
educator,
I’m writing to stimulate others.

SK: Have teachers contacted you to say they use your book(s), or some of your
articles to work with students?

NT: All the time. It’s primary my videos. I hosted
NOVA Science Now, a
spinoff
from PBS NOVA. PBS NOVA is like 60 minutes of a single topic. NOVA
Science Now, it’s a different format where there is a ten minute segment,
and then
another 10 minute segment. There’s nothing a teacher likes better than
(laughing)
ten minute videos. It’s not the whole class, but it’s not too short, it’s
enough to
wrap a lesson plan around. It’s all science, or science investigation, so
most of the
comments I get from teachers relate to videos they’ve seen or video clips
that
they’ve used to stimulate further conversation in class. Here’s what they
don’t
know, there’s hardly anything I’ve ever said publically, in a video, hardly
anything that I did not first write down and think about what words I was
using,
think about who the audience is and who I position the flow of information.

SK: For almost fifteen years you’ve hosted and moderated
the
Asimov Lecture Series at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ve
attended most of the lectures, and I’ve seen you work the stage and the
audience. There is usually 5 or 6 scientists on stage with you. I’ve always
been amazed at your ability to keep focused on 5 or 6 points of view and
then coming back at any given moment and asking a question…keeping all the balls in the air. How
do you do that?

NT: (Laughing) Thanks for noticing that. There are two kinds of comments that
I get.
One is, oh, you’re such a natural up there, and the other one is, you’re
working
hard up there. And the ones who say I’m working hard are teachers, they’re
the
educators; they’re the people who are the performers. It’s a huge investment of
my psycho-emotional energy to pull that off and to make it look smooth.

SK: I read something in which you say it’s amazing that “…in the first year
of a
child’s life we teach them to walk and talk. And then for the rest of their
lives
we want them to sit down and be quiet.” We [seem to] get to the point where
we’re not really encouraging children, and I don’t mean academically but,
why do you think this happens?

NT: Curiosity is missing. Curiosity in particular is something that the
system, not only
the educational system but, the parental…what you do as a parent at home.
Curiosity is unknown. All adults were once kids and once curious, but as
adults
you don’t remember that and you see curiosity when it’s expressed in
children as
a pathway to household disaster. They’re simply exploring their environment,
manifesting their curiosity. So what you need to do is create an environment
where curiosity is rewarded rather than punished, or thwarted. And I think
that’s
really, at the risk of over-simplifying, the problem. Curiosity is a
self-driven
motivation to explore and to learn. Learning is like…you know, you have to
take
your medicine. And that is what it has become. And that’s unfortunate.

SK: As a science educator do you have any thoughts on ways to get back to
instilling not just learning but teaching children to be curious and to
explore,
and to think, and to question?

NT: Yeah, questioning is another thing we don’t promote. If you don’t
question you’re
stuck within a pre-existing parameters of knowledge. Questions are what take
you
outside of those parameters. So only when you question does society move or
advance at all. I am researching right now on childhood science literacy. I
don’t
have enough confidence yet to make assertions as to what people should or
shouldn’t do. Everything I know about drivers of these ambitions (curiosity
and
questioning) tells me that if NASA were fully funded and advancing a space
frontier then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Because, if NASA
were advancing a space frontier there would be challenges you’ve never seen
before. You have to be creative and you have to patent some new idea. You
get
to Mars…well, how do we get the water from the soil? I gotta invent a new
device that will do that. And the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how can
we
use that? Can we breathe the oxygen from the carbon dioxide? When you’re
advancing a frontier it stimulates creativity to find solutions,
particularly when the
mission statement, and in NASA’s case it’s a literal mission, is something
that is
tantalizing, something that can capture your imagination and your ambitions.
The
aerospace engineer…all the traditional sci-tech fields…what we need to
promote
of interest, they’re all naturally part of the NASA portfolio.

SK: So why aren’t they (NASA) making the connection between their goals and
education, and the future?

NT: Because NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are
those
who presumed that we went to the moon because we’re explorers. We went to
the
moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became
clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we’re done with
the moon. People say, oh we just need charismatic leaders to continue on to
Mars. Now we’ve gone to the moon, of course Mars is next. No. Mars was
never, of course, next. It is next if you think we went to the moon because
we’re explorers, but if you know we went to the moon because we were at war
then we’re never going to Mars. There’s no military reason to do it, to
justify the expenditure. But when NASA makes discoveries they are profound
and they make headlines, everyone takes notice. It drives dialogue and,
today, it would drive the blogosphere. It would drive the projects the kids
do in school. So you wouldn’t even need programs to try and stimulate
curiosity. You wouldn’t need programs to try to convince people that science
literacy is good. Because they’re going to want to participate on this epic
adventure that we call space exploration. It will stimulate people to either
want to become STEM professionals or, if not, you’ll enter some other field
but you’ll be STEM influenced. You could be a novelist, but maybe your next
novel will be a space novel.

SK: It sounds like it would be natural. One thing follows the other?

NT: Exactly. And you innovate in ways that stoke your economy. Because
innovations in science and technology are the engines of 21st century
economies.
All the great advances in cinema came about from technology. The 3-D camera
was not invented by a movie director. The new industries are driven by the
innovations in science and technology. When NASA dreams big the country
dreams big. People…kids say, ‘I want to do that when I grow up’. Because you
want to do what’s visible to you.

SK: At the Rose Center and the Hayden Planetarium are you still bringing the
universe down to Earth? Or, are you getting the audience to think about us
going out there?

NT: When we rebuilt it [The Hayden Planetarium] and it became the Rose Center
we
focused primarily on the advance of science, not specifically on the advance
of
space exploration. It was an editorial decision to not bring space hardware
into
the facility and try to duplicate the Air and Space Museum in Washington,
which
you could never do. What we knew that we could do, and sustain and curate
over
the years, was a facility that would track the moving frontier of scientific
discovery. It doesn’t mean we can’t talk to the topic but as far as our
exhibits go
it’s not about going into space.

SK: You do a radio talk show called Star Talk. Tell me about it.

NT: “Star Talk” is a broadcast radio program. It’s got about a dozen, fifteen
stations
across the country. After each broadcast it’s posted on a download site
where you
can download the radio show, but in that state it’s called a podcast. Right
now it’s
downloaded for free. We’re still running on monies from the National Science
Foundation, which was a starter grant to try and make this work. It’s a
radio show
on science. I said, let’s invert the model (NPR where a journalist is the
host
interviewing a scientist), and have the host be the scientist, and the guest
is not a
scientist. The guest is honed from pop culture and the conversation is about
any
and all ways science may have influenced that person’s career. The value of
this
is the guest has a fan base that typically follows them wherever they are.
Their fan
base then follows them to a science talk show. I had Josh Groban, a singer.
I said
what percent of your audience are women and he said it fluctuates but it’s
typically around 103% (laughing). We talked about science in his life. [Did]
you
know he won his elementary school science fair? This came out in the…that’s
the
whole point [of the program].

I interviewed Morgan Freeman. He’s hosting a
science program now on the science channel [Through
the Wormhole]….he grew up in Mississippi and
could look out at the stars from his porch, always wondered what was going
on
out there, so we got to have that conversation. I Interviewed Nichelle
Nichols of
Star Trek. Did you know she wanted to be a singer, hoofer on Broadway? Her
first year on Star Trek she said, this is just so I can pay my rent this
year. I’m
going back to Broadway. Until she met Martin Luther King at a fund raising
party for the NAACP in Los Angeles, and he heard she was leaving the show.
He
said, you can’t do that. You can’t leave the show. You have a presence.
You’re
fourth in command on the ship. You’re female and you’re Black, this is
without
precedence in the history of television.

SK: Is Star Talk successful?

NT: It’s growing steadily, not exponentially but it’s growing monthly.
Because of the
budget limitation in the original grant proposal we said we’re going to
market it
through my social networks, my
Facebook,
Twitter. I’m about to hit 800,000 Twitter followers
[928,092 as of Jan1st 2013].

SK: You’ve developed another career. You’ve been on Jimmy Fallon, Colbert…

SK: Back to science. The Higgs Boson particle. Tell me what the discovery
was,
why it was important, and how do scientists feel about the fact that it’s
portrayed as The God Particle?

NT: The particle wields more power in the particle kingdom than other
particles do. It
came to be know as the God particle just because of the power that it had.
What it
does is sets up a field where, if you’re a particle moving through that
field, it
decides how much mass you have. It does that by creating resistance to your
motion through the field. One of the ways you can say if something has high
mass
is if you try to push it and it’s hard to push. It’s harder to push a van
than it is to
try and push a tricycle. So you say to yourself, this [van] is heavier. The
physics
way to say it is that it has more mass. Now you have particles and you’re
blindfolded and I push this particle and it’s very hard, and I push that
particle and
it’s very easy. I make a measurement and I say this has the higher mass and
this
has a lower mass. This Higgs field interacts with these particles in such a
way that
it give it a mass for its behavior as it moves through [the field]. That’s
what it
does. It gives particles mass. This is a perfect analogy…I’ve yet to find a
flaw in
this analog. If you’re at a party in Hollywood and you’re some third string
actor
and you walk in no one is going to stop you for your autograph, so you can
just
move through the party unhindered, you come and go…no one even notices.
You’re Tom Cruise and you enter the party then people collect around you and
it’s much harder for you to move through the party. A-listers have high
party
mass (laughing), there’s a party field that grants party mass based on your
celebrity level. It’s the exact same thing.

NT: That’s a excellent question, thank you for asking. There’s a book called,
On The
Day You Were Born…it’s a children’s book, illustrated…written in the 1990s
(written by Debra Fraiser). It’s a narrative of all the things going on in
the
world and in the universe on the day you wee born. So, the Arctic Tern fly
three
hundred miles that day…the polar bear migrated…and Earth went this many
miles around the sun. And I said, that’s the book I would have written…so
I’m
not compelled to write another children’s book. Because [this one] combines
simple story telling, with real science and nature.

SK: You also did a book with Donald Goldsmith called Origins. It reminds me
of
a project that Asimov did in 1989 called Beginnings. It was exactly the same
premise, from the Big Bang to the present day.

NT: Actually, any title you come up with Asimov has a book about it
(laughing).

Sandra Kitt, the author of nearly 40 published novels worked for many
years with Dr. Tyson as the Managing Director of the research library in
astronomy and astrophysics at the Hayden.

Sandra was able to get the
notoriously busy Dr. Tyson to agree to a sit-down conversation where he
weighed in, with humor, on the Mars Mission, baseball, curiosity, Isaac
Asimov, Tom Cruise, Higgs Boson, and writing.